The Boosted Man Read online

  Chapter One

  Ryder Hook jumped the last three treads of the mobile pedway from space shuttle to concrete. He was onplanet again, he owned dunnage filled with costly clothes and the trivia of the wealthy, his money-belt bulged with metal, a Delling snugged to his right wrist, and he meant to enjoy himself or know the reason why.

  A shocked incoherent screaming ripped apart the warm afternoon air of Mergone. Over the heads of the passengers in front of him, all abruptly stopped in their tracks, Hook saw a boil of men and women and aliens erupt from the customs house door. The passengers shrieked and began a frightening struggle to regain the pedway and the shuttle.

  Hook stared past them at the violent fear-crazed mob dashing madly across the concrete towards the shuttle. These people had been made hideous. Fungoid growths dripped from their faces and naked bodies where they had ripped the clothing away in agony. They oozed. They kept up a shrill ululating, screaming. Hook saw a man with one eye dangling on a long bloody-white thread and as the man ran so the other eye oozed from its socket to swing and sway about his knees. The man fell and was instantly trampled down.

  `Let me past!' screamed a whey-faced Jahnian beside Hook. He lashed out, staggering a Krifman who obstructed him. `They're diseased! They'll infect us all!'

  The Krifman, a large blocky individual, recovered with the vital alacrity usual to his race. His gun appeared instantly from his sleeve, triggered by neural and electronic circuits, fired into the air as other panicking passengers crowded and collided. Hook stepped aside. Frenzy possessed these people. A moment ago they had been cheerfully heading for the customs house and a look at this world of Mergone; now they were fighting like wild animals to get back to the shuttle which had brought them from HGL starship Talcahhuano in orbit above,

  Someone from the customs shed was shooting at the struggling passengers. A blast scythed through them. Hook saw that lethal energy strike the stewardess, standing horrified in the shuttle's airlock valve doorway. She had been a pleasant and efficient stewardess, and although built almost exactly like an Earth girl she had not been terrestrial. Her beauty had been perfectly capable of moving any man of Earth with blood in his veins. Ryder Hook hated to see that kind of waste.

  'Out of my way!'

  `Let me through!'

  In a weltering confusion the passengers went stumbling back up the pedway, jumping and stumbling, falling and crawling, fleeing back into the shuttle. The lazy afternoon broke apart in flame and horror.

  These diseased inhabitants of the planet fought amongst themselves. Mergone was only lightly populated, so Hook understood, and he guessed the disease had not spared anyone around the curve of the world. No one who stayed down here would survive. Everyone battled for a place in the shuttle.

  Again the gunman blasted from the customs shed, and this time the energy whiffed away a stumbling maddened crowd of the diseased inhabitants.

  Once the people of Mergone got their diseased hands on the shuttle they'd lift off, take HGL starship Talcahhuano, and no doubt in escaping the source of the pandemic on their own planet spread it across this sector of the galaxy. Each one would be motivated only by the desire to escape.

  There seemed to be a taint on the air — only seemed to be, for Hook could smell the sweet afternoon air and only surmise what dread spores it contained.

  The gunman fired again and then Hook saw him. Before there was need to draw and fire, the man staggered shrieking into the open. Although of humanoid shape he was not a terrestrial. He had two eyes, however, and these dribbled away from their sockets to dangle on pulsing threads. The man fell.

  Hook reached the foot of the pedway. He started up, giving the fat rump of a hysterical woman from Storton's planet a push that drove her up and through the clamouring knot of people at the airlock. Hook drove on through.

  'Hurry! Hurry!' The shuttle pilot stood at the side of the airlock valve, gesticulating, horrified, shaking, and his gun still in its holster.

  He was a youngster from Haeyfuong, one of the Emerald Eye cluster where living conditions were as good as most places in the galaxy and better than in this sector. Hook saw without compassion and without hatred that the boy had no real conception of what to do. His concern for his passengers was commendable. Beyond that, Ryder Hook would not commit himself.

  A gel-mix blob struck the handrail and passengers ducked wildly. One or two nearest the concrete were struck and those not wearing plate-fabric clothes slimed to a jelly, collapsing and deliquescing. Hook had had enough. He went up the rest of the pedway five at a time, shoving people in front of him, herding them, grabbing them by the scruffs of their necks and hauling them up, booting them on. He halted on the sill of the airlock.

  'It's horrible!' said the pilot.

  'Sure. Get inside and take this shuttle up, son, fast.'

  `But there are —'

  'I know. They're dead already. Move!'

  Over the concrete, leaping and squirming on to the pedway, the diseased monstrosities fought and clambered. Their screaming affronted the ears. They were disintegrating even as Hook watched, as though some super-lethal mix of dis-gel had been sprayed over them with a time-hold. They presented a picture that filled the young pilot's mind with loathing.

  Hook grabbed him and chucked him inside the shuttle.

  He sprang in after and, turning on the thresh-hold, drew and fired a cleansing blast from the Tonota Eighty. Scrabbling hands fell away, grotesquely twisted bodies stumbled back, and for a moment the pedway lay clear.

  'Up, you womb-regurgitant!' Hook yelled at the pilot.

  The pilot was being sick all over the tastefully gold-carpeted metalloy deck. Passengers inside the shuttle were reacting in a variety of ways, not one of which surprised Hook. The lights gleamed on ricked mouths, and staring eyes, and gesticulating hands. The interior of the shuttle erupted in a babble of voices.

  Hook valved the airlock shut. More of the grotesque monstrosities of this doomed world of Mergone surged from the customs house, and dis-gel splattered the pedway. A blast glanced from the closing airlock valve. If anyone out there shot off a Tonota Eighty, or a Martian Mega, they could blow in a shuttle hull if they kept at it long enough. Time to lift jets.

  There was no longer a stewardess to calm the passengers.

  Hook thrust his way through. He shook the pilot savagely; but that young man had reached the end of his resources. Hook dumped him and ran for the controls. This shuttle was just like a million others to be found taking passengers to and from the huge, lacy, luxurious starships in orbit around the planets of the galaxy. Hook clamped in, checked the board, found everything in the green and functioning IQ, and programmed the pre-flight pattern. Moments later he was able to punch in take-off commands and the shuttle boosted from the infected earth of Mergone.

  Hook hoped a few more poor doomed devils had been whiffed into a merciful nothingness by the take-off blast.

  He yanked the pilot up to the control section. The boy's young face stared up at Hook, grey-green like month-old cheese forgotten alongside a refrigerator. 'Sadie,' he whispered through lips bleeding where he had bitten down to stop the screaming. `Did you see Sadie — she was —'

  `Yes,' said Ryder Hook. 'She was a nice girl. If you don't want to join her get this crate back to Talcahhuano.'

  `Yes.' He pulled himself into the pilot's throne. 'You —'

  `I'm Ryder Hook, son. If you can't do the job, I can.'

  'I'm — I'm Lieutenant O'Steele. I can do it.'

  O'Steele was as good as his word. That didn't surprise Hook too much. Most starship lines employed young men — either terrestrials or some other renowned space-faring race — as deck officers and they picked well. O'Steele had only reacted as he had out of the suddenness of it
all, the shock and horror, and the tragedy of seeing the beautifully-shaped stewardess, Sadie, whiffed into nothingness before his eyes. Hook neither condemned nor condoned.

  The boy would find another cuddly armful in time.

  The shuttle speared up out of Mergone's atmosphere. O'Steele fed his calculations nicely and the on-board computer coughed out neatly precise answers. The shuttle did not have to chase the starship too far around the curve of the world. O'Steele thumbed open the screen.

  `Shuttle calling Talcahhuano,' he said, and his voice held reasonably steadily.

  The screen came on with the face of the duty officer. He was a Krifman, tough, demanding, unyielding. He was a commander. He eyed young O'Steele in the most unfriendly fashion. `You're reporting back suspiciously early, lieutenant! How can you have completed docking down there — ?'

  'I didn't! Disease — horrible — fungus — Sadie's been killed!

  They're all dead down there!'

  `You great nit-stupid curd!' roared Hook, and his left hand smashed the boy out of the throne as his right closed the circuit. The face of the Krifman died on the screen.

  `What?' O'Steele stared up from the deck. He looked shattered, helpless.

  Hook mastered himself.

  `Maybe I'm wrong, O'Steele. Just hope I am! Open up the channel again and simply report you're unable to make planet-fall. Don't give any more reasons.'

  'I don't see — ' began O'Steele in a surly manner.

  Hook put his head down and thrust his face, ugly with rage, at O'Steele.

  `What you see and what you don't see matter nothing! Just do it!'

  'I'm the officer in command —'

  Hook lifted O'Steele by the fancy gold-laced collar and shook him. 'Do it!'

  O'Steele called out again and when the Krifman commander came on the screen reported his inability to dock. Another face pushed in on the screen. Captain Copatec, commanding HGL starship Talcahhuano, glared out with the intemperate high-colour of a man who liked his drop between watches — and during them — and who now, as a captain and therefore not standing watch, could make the drops coalesce into a steady stream.

  `What's all this about, then, lieutenant?'

  O'Steele glanced at Hook, swallowed, said: 'I couldn't make planetfall, sir. There were — peculiar — circumstances against it. We'll have to return aboard ship, sir.'

  Copatec's high colour betrayed a condition that would kill him inside twenty years — a brief span of life in this man's galaxy — unless he tapered off. The Krifman commander spoke quietly in the captain's ear,

  Copatec bristled.

  `Disease? We've had reports that three systems had been infected. If the damn stuff's arrived here — '

  Hook cursed, then. There had been rumours of disease which spread in pandemic fashion to destroy the populations of those planets unlucky enough to become infected. In this solar system of Tannenbar there were fourteen planets; but only this planet they orbited, Mergone, was fully-suited for human habitation. The next planet out, Merfalla, might support life according to the interstellar almanac; but it was uninhabited. The other planets were, like their counterparts elsewhere, either frozen balls of gas or liquid-mud sun-baths.

  Captain Copatec had made up his mind. He did not like the decision; but it was his responsibility.

  `I've three thousand people aboard my ship, lieutenant. I can't risk jeopardising their lives for your sakes, however harsh that may be. I'm sorry. I cannot take you aboard. It is more than likely that disease spores entered the shuttle.'

  `But you can't!' shouted O'Steele. The enormity of the sentence hit him. 'You can't maroon us! It's death onplanet!'

  `I'm sorry, O'Steele. You are an officer of HGL spacelines. You understand the meaning of duty and loyalty to your econorg.'

  `But this isn't loyalty! This is murder!'

  `Come now, my boy! It would be murder if I let you and your diseased passengers aboard here. Surely you see that?'

  However much O'Steele argued and pleaded, Hook knew he would never alter the captain's decision. However inhumane that decision might appear, Hook knew — only too well — that in the context of the merciless whirlpool of stars, that was the only course Captain Copatec could take and remain faithful to his sworn oath as a starship commander.

  Some of the passengers in the shuttle who had recovered most of their equanimity after the horrors of their ordeal below, had pushed forward to the screen separating off the control section from the passenger compartments. They had heard enough of the conversation between starship and shuttle to understand. A crowd tried to push into the control section, shouting, yelling, their fears now a million-times greater. Above the hubbub Lieutenant O'Steele continued to plead with his captain.

  `It is no use, lieutenant. We'll report this in and there will be medical teams and assistance reaching Mergone very soon.'

  `But not before we're all dead in here!'

  `There's nothing more I can do.'

  The screen went dead.

  The interior of the shuttle turned into a bedlam of shrieks and screams. Everyone knew they had been abandoned to the sweet mercies of space.

  Hook shoved the pilot unceremoniously out of the throne.

  `Nothing of the disease did get in, you chancrous gonil! But like a babbling fool you have condemned us to death in this goddamned shuttle!'

  Chapter Two

  If in these moments when the spectre of death appeared hovering over them with the inevitability of fate Ryder Hook was the most violently angry man in the whole galaxy — well, hadn't he the right to be? Wastn't all this stupid mess everyone's fault except his own? Well, then — and what was so different about that? All his life he'd been fighting back from other people's mistakes, other people's animosity, other people's intrigues. He was no paranoiac. He was no superman. But he was confoundedly angry, all the same.

  And, being Ryder Hook, he could keep that rage under absolute control. He could present a cold hard front to the galaxy that no amount of taunting or inflammatory goading could break.

  `We must land on planet again, immediately!' the Krifman was shouting. Like almost all his race he was hard, tough, tinged with the egomaniac's complete conviction of superiority, and yet — as Hook knew — possessing a considerable degree of the admirable qualities he claimed. Now he hauled the pilot up and glared at Hook.

  `I don't know who you are, gonil! But take care of the pilot! He's the one to take us back.'

  'If you return you'll be eaten away by the disease — ' began Hook with a mild tone of voice that was chopped through by the Krifman's bellow.

  `Not necessarily! There must be areas on Mergone where the disease has not yet reached. We'll be safe there until the medical teams arrive.'

  Hook shook his head.

  `Well, I say so! We're making planetfall again. Somewhere else this time. Up in the polar regions. Safer.'

  Ryder Hook had been thinking that this situation was not one in which a man could shoot, kick, punch or fight his way to safety. He would use those methods when he had to. He would as lief hit a man over the head if that would save his own life, as not. He would prefer to think his way out of a problem, and by cunning and skill reach safety. In this case that had seemed the only way out.

  You can't slug the galaxy behind the ear.

  But now this loud-mouthed Krifman was trying to tell him what to do.

  People could and did tell Ryder Hook what to do. Usually, though, they had to speak holding a weapon in their hands, or backed by immense forces.

  The babble in the passenger compartment did not so much still as polarise around these two up front, the bulky Krifman in his plate-fab clothing and his thick, rugged, hectoring face and voice, and Ryder Hook in his plain dark-grey tunic and trousers and his battered old face that looked uglier still by reason of the facial-gel disguise he still wore.

  `Let's go down!'

  `No! We dare not!'

  The arguments raged but Hook ignored them. He pushed O'S
teele out of the compartment and when the Krifman went to prevent that, Hook looked directly at the alien. He glared. He spoke quietly; but the obsessive and strange glare of madness in his face sobered the Krifman.

  `We are shuttling to Merfalla. The almanac says it can support life. It will be rough — maybe it will be too tough for you, friend.'

  The Krifman bristled.

  `We Krifmans have no peers in the galaxy! No miserable Earthman can —'

  `Yes, well, you can save that. If you want to let down on to Mergone again, you'll have to shoot me — and I fancy my Delling will hit you before your fancy little dis-gel job will clear your wrist-bones.' Hook broke a cardinal rule. 'If you want to try it — go on!'

  The Krifman's tenseness concealed immense courage, immense powers, immense capabilities.

  If he triggered the neural and electronic circuits and his little gun flicked into firing position from his sleeve — Hook would have to beat him.

  The Krifman glowered at Hook, licked his lips, and said: `There is too much risk. We would kill innocent passengers. But — one day, gonil — '

  Hook sat down in the pilot's throne.

  Had the positions been reversed he knew he would have had no hesitation in triggering and shooting. Innocent bystanders might have been hit; they might not have been. That would have been a chance Hook would have taken when his own life was at stake.

  `These shuttles are built for a purpose. We'll have to hope this one lasts. Now get back and tell everyone to shut up and sit quietly. Conserve oxygen. It won't take too long; but you, Krifman, are in charge of keeping the innocent bystanders off my neck.'

  When a starship dropped down out of ftl to orbit a planet within a solar system she would usually distribute her passengers and freight to their destinations by shuttle. A shuttle could therefore reach a considerable distance of purely interplanetary space — as distinct from interstellar like the life shells — and this craft ought to have no difficulty at all in slipping orbits out from Mergone to Merfalla. Her construction was standard. She had been powered by HGL manufactured Kriftech IP engines which could hurl her across space in vectors that could be calculated out without reference to orbits around the central star. Not quite in straight lines — for even in the hundred and first century astronomical laws still governed the passage of bodies through space — but near enough to a straight line from Mergone to Merfalla this shuttle could be driven at relatively low velocities of sub-light speeds.